by Josh Dean
This day’s competition was formidable, with ten specials entered, including the Crufts dog, Striker, and even Jack’s own father, Honor (who ultimately did not show up). Kimberly’s expectations, she told me, were low. “I figure we have a one-in-ten chance.”
Back in the ring, if the judge didn’t hurry and clear the collies, Jack might have no handler. Finally the class dogs entered, and a man with gray hair tinted an unpleasant shade of yellow rode over on his red motorized Rascal scooter and parked directly in my line of vision. He pointed at a black tri. “Two more points and she’ll be our thirty-fifth champion,” he said, and swigged from one of two cups of coffee parked in the scooter’s front basket, along with a pack of Kool menthols.
Just as the last of the class dogs* were exiting the ring, Heather darted out of the crowd and, smiling, snatched the lead from Kimberly. And Jack seemed no worse for the lack of time to practice with his handler outside the ring. While the red tri next to him fidgeted and had to be reset, Jack stacked perfectly. “He’s her dog,” Kimberly said, her mood brightening. “Look at that focus.” Almost instantly her pride and confidence swelled. This was a whole different spectator from the one I’d been waiting with just minutes before. “Jack’s face is so distinctive that you have to look at him,” she said. “He dares you to look away.”
A nervous countenance returned briefly as she watched the judge stare at Jack and Heather on the down and back, then stare even harder when they ran around. The judge thought a minute, pointed to Heather, and said, “One,” and then to a red bitch and said, “Two”—the second dog picked is always Best of Opposite Sex, which in this case meant the best bitch in the ring—and the whole lot of them trotted around the ring in their perfunctory victory parade.
“Whee! I’m so excited!” Kimberly said, and punched me in the arm.
Jack was two out of three headed into the weekend, and as the storm swirled up the coast, preparing to bury Wildwood and knock out power and water to the convention center, Jack won again Saturday and Sunday, capping his triumphant weekend, just ten days before his Westminster debut, with a pair of fourth-place showings (known as “Group 4s” in show parlance) in the Herding Group, a set of results that was likely to land him in the rankings of the top Australian shepherds in America for the first time. Jack the Aussie was on the rise.
CHAPTER TWO
Hello, Jack, Meet the World
* * *
I used to also call them the dog world’s best-kept secret. Now everyone loves Australian shepherds.
—KERRY KIRTLEY, JACK’S BREEDER
An Australian shepherd, it seems to me—
Is the best dog that ever could be!
They’re intelligent, handsome and loving, too.
Patient, alert, persevering, on cue!
—FROM “THE MOST WANTED DOG” BY MARCIA DE VOE
* * *
Nearly two years before Wildwood, before Jack was a champion dog squaring off against the country’s best Australian shepherds, he was just a work in progress, starting his life as a tiny lump at a kennel in the dusty hills above San Bernardino, California.
Since it’s in the high desert, most nights at Wyndstar Kennels are cool and clear, with star-speckled skies, and it was no different the night the spotted pup that would grow up to be Jack plopped onto the concrete floor. There, an eight-year-old black tri named Ch Wyndstar’s Enough Said—or Gracie—had hunkered down for the arrival of the puppies that had been gestating inside her for two months.
It was April 2, 2008, sixty-three* days since Gracie had bred with Ch Millcreek’s Medal of Honor—aka Honor—and because her temperature had yet to drop below a hundred (once it hits ninety-nine or lower, the puppies are less than forty-eight hours away), Kerry Kirtley, Gracie’s owner and the proprietor of Wyndstar, felt comfortable heading up the hill to bed at a little before midnight, satisfied that the puppies she’d been anticipating for two months wouldn’t be coming for at least another day.
If it’s particularly hot or cold, Kerry will do the whelping (as the delivery of puppies is known) in her sprawling ranch house, but in the milder months it tends to take place in a small whelping room near the entrance of the tin-roofed, concrete-floored, sixteen-stall kennel that houses her Australian shepherd flock—numbering anywhere from ten to twenty-five, with wide variances depending on recent arrivals.* On this particular night, though, she was secure in the belief that the puppies weren’t done cooking, and she was still in an early-morning fog when she rose at 6:00 A.M. and trudged down to the kennel to let the dogs out for their morning constitutionals.
The light was only beginning to filter in from the outside, and Kerry had to rub her eyes to be sure that what she was seeing was real. There, in the pen, was Gracie, happily nursing five puppies in the plastic igloo that provides further shelter in each kennel for dogs who desire it. To a woman who cares for her dogs every bit as passionately as a mother does her children, the realization that she had missed not only Gracie’s birth signs but also the birth was a shocking moment for Kerry.
She hollered for her husband, Don, scooped the pups up in her arms and ran Gracie and “the kids” up the hill and into the alternate whelping room inside the house, where she let them all resume their first day in a more comfortable nest of towels while ensuring that all parties were healthy and able-bodied. “They were all breathing, and no one was bleeding,” she recalls. “Everything was fine.”
Over her three decades of breeding at least one litter a year, and sometimes two or three (“never more than three”), Kerry can count on one hand the whelps she’s missed, and in every other case she missed them due to traveling for work. For those dozens of other whelpings, Kerry has been there, with Don, for however long it takes (“from four hours to twelve”), using dental floss to tie off umbilical cords and then applying iodine to sterilize navels and prevent infection, clearing out nasal passages with a bulb syringe, and deploying heating pads for any puppy who appears to need it.
When her prized Phoebe, a dog who had once been the second-ranked Aussie in America, began to drop puppies from her first litter a week premature, Kerry tucked one of the tiny preemies into her bra and another into her armpit and rushed them to the incubator while helping Phoebe safely deliver the third and final pup. Once everyone was stabilized—the survival of premature puppies is extremely tenuous—Kerry carefully placed them all together in the house whelping box and basically lived on an adjoining mattress for the next sixteen days, making sure the three puppies, none of which weighed more than five ounces, survived by tube-feeding them every two hours for the first three days. The pups, she recalls, “were no bigger than my index finger, and I didn’t think they would live.” Complicating matters was the fact that Phoebe was a new mom and “didn’t know squat.” Half of the reason Kerry couldn’t leave was to keep the mother from accidentally stepping on her pups. And all three survived to day sixteen, when tragedy struck. Kerry left the whelping room to take a work call, and Phoebe lay down on the sole boy, suffocating him. “I thought I was going to die,” Kerry recalls, and she’s still emotional at the memory. “I worked sixteen days to keep them alive. It was heartbreaking.”
The two remaining puppies, both girls, survived and thrived and are today two dogs that will never leave Wyndstar. One, Flav, is now a champion and will likely soon have a brood of her own.
Having endured such an experience, and heard of worse from other breeders, Kerry was always on edge around due dates. So you can understand why the memory of missing the arrival of Jack and his siblings would trouble her—and continue to bug her for months and even years after. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d let Gracie down, even though the puppies arrived safely.
Gracie, however, was no worse for the experience. She was an old pro; this was the fourth of four lifetime litters, and she’d managed just fine on her own. Because the birth went unwitnessed, we’ll never know where Jack appeared in the order of arrivals, but the total count was four boys and o
ne girl, ranging in weight from 11 to 15 ounces. Two of the boys were blue merles. Jack was the biggest (at 15.1 ounces); his brother was 2 ounces lighter.
However it happened, they’d have arrived one by one, in sacs, which Gracie would have punctured to free the pups, then licked their faces to stimulate breathing. With no human around to cut the cords, Gracie just chewed through them and ate the evidence, the way canine mothers have for millennia. And then Jack and his siblings would have settled in for the first meal of their lives.
When Kerry and Don Kirtley, her second husband, bought the property that is now Wyndstar in 1982, the year they married, it was just a single barren acre with nothing on it but dirt and rocks. For the first three years, the Kirtleys lived in a travel trailer on the only flat spot on the property, until Don, an electrician, and Kerry built the house themselves, but only after they’d built the barn to contain the desires of the missus—an animal lover who fantasized about a menagerie of horses, goats, dogs, cats, and chickens. Today the property has grown to three acres and is well shaded by vegetation hand-planted by Kerry and Don, with peach and plum and pomegranate trees, flowering hedges, and a grove of cottonwoods that harbor a constant thrum of hummingbirds so numerous that Don has to refill the feeders twice a day.
Five miles up the hill, the Angeles National Forest starts, meaning that the Kirtleys share these highlands with all manner of varmint. Coyotes are a constant threat to small pets. Eagles are capable of snatching puppies. Mountain lions have been darted and relocated to higher, less populated altitudes. Then there’s the constant threat of fire, fueled by the area’s notorious Santa Ana winds.
Once she and Don were settled in, Kerry began to search for a dog that complemented her outdoorsy lifestyle. She wanted something she could bring out with the horses, and take hiking and fishing, and her research led her to a then-somewhat-new breed known as the Australian shepherd. Aussies, as they were commonly called, were said to be active and energetic and smart—in almost every way, the perfect dogs for outdoorsy people—as well as very friendly and loyal. They were said to be good family dogs that fit in with most personalities and lifestyles, to have a protective instinct, the will and energy to run for days, and the propensity to grow so attached to owners that one of the breed’s nicknames is “the Velcro dog.”
Most every kennel owner’s story begins the way Kerry’s does, with a statement like this: “I started with one.” Growth thereafter is exponential. From the outset Kerry’s preferred style was the red merle, and in 1985 she got her first, a female that unfortunately turned out to have a congenital heart problem, putting her at high risk of sudden death, particularly when so much of her time would be spent chasing after horses. Kerry returned the puppy a day later and “searched far and wide” for another. When she couldn’t find a red merle, she took the next-best thing, a red tri from New York State, and Annie, as she was named, became the first of many Australian shepherds to enter Kerry’s life. A year later she added a second dog. Then two dogs turned into three, and then four. By 1987, one of the dogs had a litter of puppies, and by 1991, with the arrival of a beautiful bitch named Hailey, Kerry was breeding officially. Wyndstar—so named because “we live in the wind tunnel of the world” and because “they were all going to be stars in my world”—was born.*
Today there are generally fifteen adult dogs, plus babies, spanning the age spectrum, and everybody gets a turn in the house. Though they spend parts of their day—and most nights—in kennels inside the barn, Kerry is adamant that hers are not just kennel dogs. For one thing, each dog’s enclosure is large—twelve-by-twelve inside and open to a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot outdoor area that can be closed off to protect small dogs from coyotes and eagles. Those spaces in turn connect to three acres of “turnout areas,” where the dogs can run and play freely, and beyond that, on many days when Don and/or Kerry is home and the front gate is shut, some portion of the dogs are given the run of the entire property.
It’s hard to figure out how Kerry, now in her mid-fifties, has time to look after so many dogs, but she does. In her capacity as a veterinary-product representative, she works for a company that sells more than thirteen thousand different items (“from ears to rears”), ranging from disposable syringes to a hundred-thousand-dollar digital X-ray machine. Every day she visits some of the eighty accounts that must be serviced biweekly, then returns home to her dogs, maintaining a constant chatter with Aussie owners around the world on her BlackBerry.
Not surprisingly, she is very thin, and often tan, and with her high energy and reddish hair with blond highlights, she has, like so many dog owners, taken on a little of the appearance of her animals. She looks, in fact, a bit like a human iteration of her favorite dog, a red merle.
Dogs come and go at Wyndstar—they’re born and get placed, but they also drop in for breedings, to diversify the gene pool in whatever way Kerry feels is necessary, and sometimes they arrive because she can’t help herself. Just as often they go. A few dogs are permanent, but the majority are itinerant; puppies stay until they’re sold but are welcome forever, with one rule: “Everybody has to get along. If anybody’s pushy, they don’t stay.” Kerry pairs them up for companionship, so that everybody has a buddy. And they all get her attention and affection. As she likes to point out, she does not have kids. “These are my children.”
Even for an experienced breeder, it’s difficult to look at a ten-week-old puppy and know that it’s going to be a show dog. Puppies are like adolescent children, all potential in an awkward package. So Kerry often ships her dogs off into the world having no idea what they’ll become. One thing Jack had from the beginning, though, was presence and attitude, relatively rare qualities that can’t be instilled. “He had that ‘Here I am! There’s a spotlight over my head!’” Kerry explains. And a dog that seems to crave attention automatically has a leg up if your goal is to win dog shows.
To become a top show candidate, it is essential that a dog have this attitude, plus perfect structure, or “conformation,” as it’s known in the show world. Most times one thing or another is lacking. And on rare occasions you get everything in one package. Breeders know from experience to be cautious. One problem of attaching expectations to a dog is that you set yourself up for disappointment. The main reason Kerry prefers to keep her best show candidates for at least a year, as opposed to selling them as pups, is that people expect a dog labeled as “show quality” to be a surefire winner. Too many times she’s seen good puppies come home to her. “A dog loses once and people are calling saying, ‘Why didn’t we win?’” she told me. “You know what? You lose more than you ever will win.”
Nonetheless, Wyndstar has produced many champions over the years, the most successful being Phoebe, whom Kerry showed in back-to-back years starting in 2006. The first year she covered the expenses, including the cost of a professional handler. The second year, when Kerry had a backer to help cover the costs, Phoebe was the number-one Aussie for most of the year, taking two Bests in Show* and many Group Firsts, and in the end the beautiful blue merle missed being the number-one Australian shepherd in America by a measly seven points.
Given his “exuberant energy,” Kerry saw some parallels in Jack and had high hopes for him from the beginning. He was, she recalled, “my pick in the litter. A real standout—what a sweet boy he was.” Kerry was due for a successful male. She’d been unfortunate in that her last two big winners had been girls, which complicates matters for a breeder in that a female dog can’t both show and breed. Whereas a stud dog can take a day here and there for breeding or, better yet, can have his semen frozen, which doesn’t just save on travel and stress—it provides protection, God forbid, should anything happen.
It was for these reasons, and more, that Kerry had very high hopes for Blue Merle Boy #1, the dog we now know as Jack.
CHAPTER THREE
Jack’s Mom, Human Variety
* * *
Humans don’t just like dogs, we cannot do without them.
&n
bsp; —JON FRANKLIN, The Wolf in the Parlor
* * *
Kerry wasn’t immediately sure whether she’d keep this young male or offer him for sale to the right home. As she always did with new arrivals, she posted photos of Jack and his siblings on her kennel’s Web site to test the waters, and that’s where Kimberly Smith first saw him, while banging away on her laptop in search of a companion from her Pennsylvania home, nearly three thousand miles from Wyndstar.
By day Kimberly is the director of Phonebet and player services at Parx Racing & Casino, a horse track north of Philly. In that capacity she serves as senior management, overseeing all wagering, both live and by phone. Even when there’s no actual racing at Parx, there are simulcast races from places like Dover and Santa Anita to attract the bored, the elderly, and the addicted, so Parx is a 364-day-a-year business. (Even bettors pause to open Christmas presents, ideally cash.) After steadily climbing the management ladder for fourteen years, she technically works a nine-to-five day but has great flexibility in her schedule.
Kimberly is also a single mother to a teenage son named Taylor, who in mid-2008 was nearing his sixteenth birthday and in the home stretch of his adolescence. The sole provider for most of Taylor’s life, Kimberly was already feeling the bond between them straining, as her son increasingly felt around for his independence. He was, of course, just being a teenager, but when you’re a teenager, it’s not cool to hang around with your mom anymore. And that new reality is never easy for a mother to accept.
She told Taylor she was going to get him a dog for his sixteenth birthday, and his reaction was, “Yeah, right. You’re getting a dog for yourself.” Which of course she was, considering that he’d never once asked for one himself.